Don't Give In to AI FOMO

Disclaimer: I'm a huge AI fan and use it for hours every day. But it has to be used for tasks where it makes sense. Not blindly for everything.

Staying rational is hard right now. The AI hype is everywhere, and the fear of missing out affects (FOMO) most people and businesses.

Every day I see new tools trying to solve problems that simply cannot be solved. At least not in the way these tools attempt to do it. The people building them either don't understand how AI and large language models (LLMs) actually work, or they're intentionally misleading people who are vulnerable to AI FOMO.

I see this in my consulting work too. Clients ask me to implement things that don't make sense. They would throw away money without seeing results. So I politely decline. My number one value is honesty with my clients and business partners.

Tracking AI Like We Used to Track SEO

When we moved to the online world in the late 90s, we started tracking everything possible. Visits. User behavior. You name it. The same applied to SEO activities. Search engines delivered fairly stable keyword positions without significant personalization, so tracking made sense.

Unfortunately, once we entered the AI world powered by LLMs, we lost this ability. No tracking is available for these AI services anymore. But people still have the same habit. They want to track everything.

That's when a flood of new tools started appearing. Every day brought another solution for tracking AI prompts. Is your brand mentioned? For what prompt? In which position? The problem is that this logic simply cannot work.

LLMS naturally operate with significant variety and creativity. They don't give the same answer to the same question twice. Recently, personalization has made this even harder. The chance of getting the same or similar answers drops even further.

There's another problem too. If you ask 100 people to write a prompt about the best coffee, you'll almost certainly get 100 different prompts.

Recently, Rand Fishkin ran a great experiment and published research about tracking AI visibility. His findings basically confirm that share of voice is the only metric that makes sense to track. However, making it accurate costs serious money. We're not talking about a few hundred dollars. For small businesses, expect to start at least in the low four figures.

Don't Try to Automate Everything

As a freelancer, I've tried to apply AI to many routine tasks. The goal was to save time for a healthier life, friends, and family. I've sped up many processes significantly. But many others I still do manually.

I'd say I was able to automate maybe 30% to 40% of my processes. The rest either didn't make sense or simply didn't work as expected with AI.

I've heard similar feedback from multiple companies and agencies. Yet on social media, especially LinkedIn, we see tons of posts about agencies with just one founder and AI agents handling everything. These people are lying to us. But the sheer volume of such posts triggers FOMO in all of us.

AI Slop Is Everywhere

Another huge problem is AI slop. It's everywhere now.

It starts on social media. I use these platforms less and less because I'm annoyed by nonsense AI videos and images. Then there are websites fully generated by AI, often without any human touch. They give me no reason to read anything on them.

Let me be clear. I'm not against AI. I use it quite a lot. Not just for coding, but also for writing. Even this text has been improved by AI since English is not my first language.

The problem arises when there's no human touch and the content brings nothing new or useful to the table. Why should anyone read summary number 4,998,723 about the best types of coffee?

If you want to stand out in this new AI world, you have to bring something genuinely interesting or helpful.

Stay strong. Stay rational. Don't give in to FOMO.

We have our own brains. Let's use them.